What o'clock is it?

The contraction of the word “of” to o’ is considered highly informal, but the phrase “o’clock” is somehow different.

This week on That’s What They Say, host Rina Miller and University of Michigan English Professor Anne Curzan discuss how we talk about time.

The expression “o’clock” comes from “of clock” as in “according to the clock,” says Curzan.

It might seem like an antiquated phrase, but "o'clock" is still used quite a lot. But, there is something else on the rise and that is the use of a.m. and p.m.

The abbreviations are shortened from Latin phrases. P.M. comes from post meridian or after midday. It comes into English in 1666, according to the Oxford English dictionary. And then a.m. comes from anti-meridian for before midday.

Curzan found that many years ago there was an interesting use of “o’clock” that might sound strange to us today. “In earlier times instead of saying ‘what is the time’ you could say ‘what is o’clock?’ or you could say ‘what o’clock is it?’”

Today begins daylight savings time, which means we “spring forward” one hour. And since we are talking about a.m. and p.m. here's a questions for you. Is 5 p.m. in the evening or afternoon? You decide.

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In this week’s edition of That’s What They Say, Host Rina Miller and University of Michigan English Professor Anne Curzan discuss regional words to describe the weather.

Depending on where we live, we use different names for a "light snow." According to the Dictionary of American Regional English, some speakers call this a skiff or a skift. However, in the Midwest and on the East Coast, people are more likely to use the terms dusting or flurry.

It seems like it should be straightforward to figure out if the subject of your sentence is singular or plural, but sometimes it’s just not.

On this week’s edition of That’s What They Say, University of Michigan English Professor Anne Curzan joins Weekend Edition Host Rina Miller to discuss subject-verb agreement issues.

If the subject of a sentence is you or someone you know, the corresponding verb is sometimes singular and sometimes plural. Which is correct?

The appropriate verb may depend on the sentence’s meaning. If the subject implies either you or someone you know, but not both, the verb should be singular. If the subject may refer to both you and someone you know, a plural verb is acceptable.

“It gets a little more complicated if one of those nouns is singular and one of them is plural,” Curzan warns. “Then you employ the proximity rule.”

If a "preventive" measure is the same thing as a "preventative" measure, it seems hard to justify having both words.

This week on That’s What They Say, host Rina Miller and University of Michigan English Professor Anne Curzan discuss words with multiple endings.

In this case of preventive and preventative, preventive is used more often. So is the shorter ending always more common?

“If we look at the ‘ive’ ending as in preventive, versus the ‘ative’ ending as in preventative, it’s not always the case that the shorter one wins,” Curzan argues.

When looking at the terms exploitative and exploitive, Curzan found that the “ative” ending is four times more common than the “ive” ending. Nevertheless, both of these terms are in dictionaries, making either usage correct.